Discerning a Vocation to Be a Catholic Intellectual | Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2020

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was offered at the 2020 Student Leadership Conference held in Estes Park, CO from August 2nd - August 6th.

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Speaker Bio:

Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P., is the Director of the Thomistic Institute and Assistant Professor in Systematic Theology at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.L. from the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America, and a doctorate in Sacred Theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He entered the Order of Preachers in 2001, after having practiced constitutional law for several years as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has also taught at The Catholic University of America Law School and at Providence College. He is the author of The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Transcript

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0:00.0	The title of this talk is discerning a vocation to be a Catholic intellectual.
0:08.5	So I made up the title, but I'm not sure it's a good title.
0:13.6	We'll see as we go forward. So discerning a vocation to be a Catholic intellectual.
0:20.5	To talk about this requires us to talk about God's plan for your
0:25.5	life. Usually that's what people mean when they talk about discernment. You know, how do I figure out
0:30.5	God's plan for my life? And some people think that God has a plan for my life, something along the lines like this,
0:39.3	that God has inscribed something on a stone tablet in heaven, which is his plan for what
0:47.0	he wants me to do.
0:49.3	And now my job is to try and guess what it is.
0:54.0	And if I get it wrong, I'm going to screw everything up.
0:57.0	And so then I work myself into all kinds of knots,
1:01.0	worrying that maybe I'm getting it wrong,
1:03.0	and how will I ever know if I've gotten it right,
1:05.0	and it just seems impossible,
1:07.0	and I want to do the perfect thing, but I don't know what that is,
1:09.0	and so I end up stuck.
1:14.4	Other people will say, well, actually, what I need to do to figure out what's written on that stone tablet is to interpret all of the supernatural signs that are happening around me.
1:24.5	So maybe it's like, oh, I think I saw in the way the cream dropped
1:28.6	into my coffee this morning that God wants me to be a contemplative nun, you know, because I just
1:35.1	saw the way the cream billowed, you know, or something like that. Okay, perhaps you're familiar
1:40.7	with some of these kinds of ways of going about what might be called vocational discernment.
1:48.1	I think this is all based on a kind of misunderstanding or even an error.
	...

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